1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system, specifically an apparatus and accompanying methods, for implementing in a networked client-server environment, such as the mobile Internet, an anonymous and user-transparent technique for uniquely identifying network-distributed devices without device or user identifying information provided explicitly for the purpose of identifying the client device.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Internet usage, and particularly that of the mobile Internet, is growing explosively, particularly as the number of mobile sites increase and users that have access to mobile devices continues to rapidly expand.
Mobile Internet devices are characterized by their constrained software environments, as well as by the peculiarities of the individual devices themselves. Constraints include minimal network bandwidth resulting in slow content retrieval, minimal CPU processing and memory facilities, as well as a dearth of persistent storage across sessions, called client side browser cookies. Traditional online advertising approaches, such as the tracking of individual users across sessions and controlling the frequency and relevance of advertising presented to them, simply do not exist in the mobile Internet today. Lack of standard advertising metrics for mobile campaigns, derived using browser cookies on the Web, such as the number of unique site visitors, has discouraged online advertisers from taking advantage of the unique personalized nature of mobile devices and local content.
Mobile usage modalities, often a result of the constrained network environment as well as device limitations themselves, severely hamper achieving the quality advertising experiences expected by web online users and expected by advertisers. For example, use of bookmarks to access sites visited on a regular basis is common, largely driven by the pain of entering full Internet site addresses. As a result of tiny mobile keyboards and user unfriendly forms based interfaces, very few users will type in content site addresses directly. Rather they find it far easier to use an on carrier deck search engine to locate relevant content, and then save a bookmark for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) deck or Internet Page they visit regularly, using that saved bookmark for future direct access.
Mobile Internet advertising currently consists of streaming graphic files, in real time, into content rendered by a user's mobile device browser. Image and text call to action advertising tags are embedded in the content at a publisher's content management system. This occurs prior to delivery of the actual content to the user over the wireless network. Current mobile practice for many of the server side include ad serving systems, is to log delivery of user impressions when the ad tags are transmitted from the ad server, across the Internet to the publisher's content system, whether or not they actually arrive.
As those skilled in the art will certainly appreciate, server-side include refers to a variable value (for example, a file “Last modified” date) that a server can include in an HTML file before it sends it to the requester. For example, where one is creating a Web page, an include statement can be inserted in the HTML file that looks like this:<!--#echo var=“LAST_MODIFIED”-->and the server will obtain the last-modified date for the file and insert it before the HTML file is sent to requesters.
A Web file that contains server-side include statements (such as the “echo” statement above) is usually defined by the administrator to be a file with an “.” suffix. As such, one may consider a server-side include as a limited form of common gateway interface (CGI) application. In fact, the CGI is not used. The server simply searches the server-side include file for CGI environment variables, and inserts the variable information in the places in the file where the “include” statements have been inserted.
Upon receipt of advertising mark up tags over the Internet, they are then inserted into the content by the publisher's content management system. This occurs prior to transmission of the content to the end user device. The more desirable approach is to count impressions only after an actual presentation of the advertising to an end user. Since most mobile advertising systems have no way of determining whether an ad actually got delivered and played to completion, the result can be inaccurate impression accounting. Another example of the problem is users who navigate to a new content page before the entire ad has been rendered, which results in an impression reported erroneously even though those users never saw that advertisement.
Most publishers just can't afford the quantity of additional servers and complexity they require to manage multiple flavors of ad embedding software for multiple ad server vendors. This is needed in order to interface to multiple server side include systems just to obtain adequate inventory fill rates to fully monetize their content. The added requirement that publishers pay for their own bandwidth to interface to a server side include system in order to retrieve ad tags across the Internet, before they can insert them and then transmit the content to the user is simply not scalable across millions of simultaneous users. Just like for WEB advertising, client side delivery and counting mechanisms are necessary to accurately distribute revenue across multiple parties, as well as provide accurate auditing, long the standard in traditional advertising.
In view of the fundamental drawbacks associated with server side include mobile advertising systems, and the lack of reliable browser cookie implementations known in the art, automatic anonymous server side device identification and device profile management appears to hold the most promise of all these techniques. Yet, the limitations inherent in conventional implementations of mobile ad serving have effectively prevented this form of advertising from effectively fulfilling its promise. Moreover, the deficiencies inherent in all known mobile advertising techniques have, to a significant extent, collectively inhibited the use of mobile advertising in general.
A pressing need exists for a new system for anonymously and transparently uniquely identifying network-distributed devices without the requirement for explicitly provided device or user identifying information, which does not suffer from infirmities associated with such techniques known in the art. Therefore, there is a need to create a new anonymous unique device identifying system, which can be used by advertisers to expand the use of mobile advertising to mobile Internet devices.